Hank radioed Janine to tell her all was well, then pushed forward down the hall, passing an open bathroom and an office with a debris-covered desk. He rounded a corner, leading us farther into the back of the office. The light from the front windows all but vanished. On the left, a door read STORAGE. Hank waited for us to join him, then opened the door with the same sweep of light as before. The room had been tossed, but remained full of supplies. “This looks promising,” Rosa announced with a smile, pushing past Hank. “Come in here!” We all entered the room, and Rosa grabbed boxes, test tubes, a tabletop centrifuge, plastic bottles, and an assortment of sealed paper packages, jamming them into any backpack where they would fit. “Wow. We lucked out here,” she said. “This stuff must look useless to most people.... Well, I guess it actually is useless for most people. But we’re lucky to find all of it intact.”
“Did you find everything you need?” Hank asked, hopefully.
“Yes and no.” She swirled a plastic bottle in her hand, peering closely at it with her flashlight. “This agar powder is the biggest question mark. Conditions in here may have turned it bad. I want to get as much as we can before we leave. Can we look for more here?” Hank and I looked at each other and shrugged. Why not? We zipped up our bags full of everything Rosa had found.
Hank led the way again, into the hall, deep into the back of the building. On the left, he saw another closed door and moved toward it.
As he opened the door, we were immediately blinded by light. How was that possible, here in the back of this dark building? Hank swung his pistol and flashlight in an arc, but for a moment we were all blinded by the piercing glare. After a moment our eyes adjusted, and we could see we’d reached the far side of the building and were standing outside a room full of medical equipment. The light came from a door on the far side of the room that stood open onto the back parking lot. Machines glinted in the sunlight. Hank squinted and turned back to us with a wry smirk. “Guess we could’ve just come in that door,” he said. Then we all heard a low rumbling.
Not a rumble. A growl. Hank jerked to attention, whipped the flashlight back through the room. In the back, under a space in the countertop probably meant for a chair... there were eyes looking back at us. First two large ones, then additional pairs, smaller, all catching the light. Hank pointed the pistol and flashlight directly at the eyes, and we saw... dogs. Or a dog. A momma dog, I presumed, and several pups. The pups looked at us in surprise and fear. But the mother bared her teeth in a vicious snarl. The growl grew louder as she realized how close we were to her litter. Hackles pleated her back as she took a step toward us. She looked to be a mutt, but a bulky, powerful one. Maybe part Rottweiler, perhaps part Bull Terrier. Her coat was a mix of black and brown. We stepped back, jamming the space with our bodies. I positioned myself between Rosa and Hank, putting her at the back of our ranks. If anything happened to Hank or me, it was important that Rosa get back alive. That the supplies get back, too. As we moved, the mother dog leapt forward a foot or so, asserting her authority. Could we blame her? Three strangers had just invaded her home.
Suddenly a shadow fell across the back doorway as another dog stepped into view. The daddy, I presumed. He was huge, much larger than the momma, skin bursting with muscles, and now he too began to growl, teeth bared. We stepped farther away. And they came for us.
I had my own gun, but only Hank had any kind of shot through the doorway. The female broke to our left, while the male went to our right, forcing Hank to decide which was the eminent threat. He chose the male. Not really aiming, he fired two or three times toward the rushing dog, hitting it more than once and ending its attack in a high-pitched yelp of pain. Whether dead or just injured, we didn’t know. There was no time. We turned and ran, Rosa leading me, with Hank following behind. The female caught him at the turn of the hallway, grabbing his ankle with her teeth. Hank fell to the floor, his gun and flashlight clattering out in front of him. Rosa and I turned as Hank kicked at the dog with his free foot. She twisted and shook his leg in a rage, seemingly trying to tear it off his body. Hank screamed in pain.
Without thought, I raised my pistol and fired, hitting the female in the hindquarters in a broad splash of blood that sprayed the white walls. Another pained yelp. The dog released Hank, and he pushed himself up and lurched toward us. “Go, get out of here!” he yelled. We turned and ran, Hank limping beside us. He still had the sense to radio Janine. “Look alive, we need to move!” he said into the walkie-talkie. We passed back through the lobby and made for the front door. Through the shattered front windows, we could see Janine had backed the jeep up directly to the door and was waiting for us. We pushed outside, jumped into the waiting jeep, with Hank last of all. Rosa and I helped pull him into his seat as Janine gunned the engine. At that moment, the wounded, bloody mother dog ran out of the slowly closing front door and leapt at the side of the jeep beside my leg. Janine thrust into another gear and the jeep accelerated, leaving the dog behind. As we burst onto the main road and pointed toward home, Hank looked back toward the building, where the dog stood still barking at us. “I wish I had brought the damned grenades,” he said.
* * *
Hank took off his boots and inspected his ankle. It was red and swollen, but there were no puncture wounds. Luckily, he had taken to wearing very thick construction boots, and while the pressure from the strong jaws was intense, I could see there would be no lasting damage. Janine guided us back the way we came as Rosa inspected the backpacks in the daylight.
It turned out that we brought back everything Rosa had on her list. But then she needed eggs.
20
After using the new equipment to make cultures, Rosa put samples of the flu into fertilized chicken eggs and incubated them. Then came the risk she had to make someone else take. Since Rosa had already been cured, she couldn’t test the solution on herself. But in two days time, a family of three came into The Oasis, with their little girl already in the process of turning. She had been bitten by an attacking zombie while the family slept in a tent two nights before they arrived. It was amazing they all made it to The Oasis on foot after that. Rosa talked it over with Marian, and took the girl to the lab. They decided to try the egg solution. Cracking an egg, Rosa carefully went through a series of steps to extract the part she wanted into a beaker, then used pipettes to transfer the results into several test tubes. Loading those into the centrifuge we had recovered in Augusta, she set it spinning. After a time, she unloaded the tubes, extracted another portion using another pipette, and put that into a clean new test tube. She turned around with a tube half full of a milky, yellow-tinged fluid, looking at me with a nod.
“You’re the doctor,” she said, holding out the test tube and a syringe. Wordlessly, I prepped the needle and jabbed it into the girl’s deltoid. In her feverish state, she put up no fight.
“A very small number of people are deathly allergic to eggs,” I said while working. “If she is, she dies either way.” No one seemed to appreciate my honesty.
But the little girl wasn’t allergic, and she didn’t die. In two days, she was alert. In five, she was out playing with the other kids.
Rosa had found a way to deliver a cure for the zombie outbreak, and it even came in a convenient carrying case, inside its own shell. She made dozens of egg cures. In just weeks, the original processing of new people was ended — no more saliva swabs, no more gurneys and restraints, no more anxiety and terror. Everyone who came in was just given an egg.
Soon, Rosa felt compelled to share the answer with the outside world. She talked to Harvey. “I want to take this to Atlanta,” she declared.
Harvey, as usual, was nonplussed. “To the CDC, I assume?”
“Yes. I can show them how easy it is to reproduce, to transport. They can verify my results. We can tear down the city walls and go back to living.” She was passionate about it, and Harvey agreed we should try.
“But it won’t be easy,” he said. “They aren’t going to just swing open the gates for you.”
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I thought about nearly having been blown up on the highway. “Richmond shot at us,” I said.
“Yep. Cities tend to do that.” Harvey thought for a moment. “I can send scouts. We can test out the range of their guns and find a way to deliver your message without being shot on sight.” As anxious as Rosa was, she knew it had to be done. Within an hour, Harvey had recruited Hank and Janine for the new job. The next morning they were on the way. We had to wait three days for their return. It wasn’t good news.
21
Hank and Janine looked shaken. Harvey had gathered his inner circle, eight of the oldest and I assumed wisest citizens of The Oasis. Next to Harvey’s office in the lodge, there was a large event room offering some privacy, so we met there.
“Atlanta fell,” Hank said, with no preamble. “There’s no one at the wall, and several pieces of it look like they’ve been torn down. There was a lot of smoke, too.”
Janine took over. “A lot of people are streaming out of the city. They’re looking for somewhere to go.”
“Do you think they know where we are?” Harvey asked.
Hank and Janine shared a sideways glance, embarrassed, guilty. “Maybe,” Hank said, looking down.
“Oh, my God, did you lead them here?” It was one of the inner circle, a thin, nebbishy older man with glasses, named Gerald. The rest of the inner circle looked around at each other; some made whispered comments.
“No!” Hank looked shocked.
“Hold on, hold on,” said Harvey, raising his big hands. He looked at Hank and Janine. “What happened?”
Hank hung his head. Janine started, “He didn’t do anything wrong.”
Eyes locking on Hank, Harvey said, “Son, no one here is going to blame you for doing a job I sent you out to do. Just tell us what happened.” Harvey glanced at the others, willing them to be patient.
“Janine and I have scouted around Atlanta many times before...,” Hank began.
“The very reason I sent you this time,” said Harvey.
“Right,” Hank said. “So, we knew the area. We knew generally where the defenses were strongest. We took our jeep in on Interstate 20. It shoots directly into Atlanta going west, so we can get pretty close. They don’t hold that area behind their wall, they’re in the downtown and northern areas.” He took a breath. “As we got near Grant Park, we knew we’d have to be on our toes. Around when there’s the split for 75/85 North, you can see the downtown, all the tall buildings. There’s a fence there, but it’s too far outside for anyone to guard. It’s good for cover, if you want to sneak up and take a look at downtown. We’d done it before, but we’d never seen anything like this. A few of the skyscrapers were on fire, the golden-domed one and some taller ones farther north. So we decided to come up to the southern wall as close as we could to see what was going on.
“Closer to downtown, Interstate 75/85 is the south wall. There isn’t a lot of great cover around there, so we did it slow and stayed hidden. By the time we went a few blocks, we could hear them. There were people — lots of people — outside the wall.” He paused.
“From there, we started to see people all over, but farther away,” Janine said. “Lots of big groups, making caravans, headed somewhere. It looked pretty disorganized — people going everywhere. But a lot were headed east. We went in closer. I think we were just... curious. We’d seen the outside of their walls so many times, no one around, nothing but the possibility of getting shot. And now there were people.”
Hank took over the story again. “So we were trying to sneak around... and we stumbled right into a group of people standing in the parking lot of a small old building, some kind of old store.” Hank dropped his head again, but kept talking. “They were loading guns, gear, food, water — all into some pickup trucks. We tried to go by without them seeing, but...”
“But you don’t look like them,” Harvey offered.
“Yeah. The city must have just fallen within a couple of days. They were all still trying to be really clean, really neat. They had on those synthetic clothes everyone wears in the cities, so when they looked at us, they just knew. They could smell it on us and see it in every fiber of our clothing — that we were different.” Hank set his jaw, drumming his fingers on the table. “A couple of them, they had another look: infected. But I don’t think the people with them had noticed it yet. One of them was even the driver of one of the pickups.”
Gerald interrupted. “You saw a zombie driving a truck?” There were gasps.
“We saw him behind the wheel,” Hank said. “And he came after us along with the others. So, yeah.” Hank looked around the table, at all of us, like he was willing us to understand how seriously he meant this.
Harvey thought it over. Then Anya, the oldest-looking woman in the circle, spoke up. “I guess we shouldn’t be surprised. Rabid animals experience a period of behavioral change, they don’t just immediately become hyper-reactive. With RL2013, the disease acts even more erratically. Sometimes the various stages are longer or shorter. An infected person might have many days when they can still maintain normal functions — including driving — even though they’re progressing downward into dementia. But an infected person behind the wheel of a car...” She trailed off.
“Would be like a lunatic guiding a missile.” Harvey completed her thought. We all stared at one another until finally Harvey turned back and asked Hank and Janine to finish their report.
Janine took a breath. “We dodged them all we could. We thought we’d lost them by the time we made our way back to our jeep. We took side streets to stay unnoticed; they must’ve taken the highway the whole way.” Harvey nodded, silently prompting her to continue.
“When we finally got back on to 20 East to make time, we saw them in the rearview behind us. But not just those couple of pickups. There were dozens of vehicles. They weren’t too close to us then, but we stood out. We were the only moving thing on the road in front of them. It was too easy to follow us.”
Hank had been nervously drumming his fingers the whole time Janine spoke, but now he stopped. “As soon as we saw them, we knew we had to try to send them in some other direction,” he said, “so we got off 20 and went south toward Macon.” Hank pulled out a worn paper map to show us. “We did a bunch of zigzagging to try to throw them off. We saw them follow us south, a whole huge bunch of them. But we really don’t know how far they went that way, or how convinced they were.”
“Especially since there are rumors,” Harvey mused.
“Yeah.” Hank shuddered.
Harvey addressed Rosa and me. “We know from people coming into The Oasis that they’ve heard rumors, at least throughout Georgia and South Carolina: Go to the border lakes. So if these people from Atlanta have heard the rumors, we could be in for a whole lot of company.”
Janine nodded grimly. “That’s what we’re worried about.”
Rosa and I exchanged a careful, noncommittal look. This didn’t seem like the time to let them know that some rumors had made it at least as far north as DC.
Vincent, another member of the circle, snapped. “We’re doomed! I mean, we’re done here, folks.” He had the frantic, smiling sarcasm of someone who thinks there’s nothing left. “Kiss The Oasis goodbye!”
Harvey’s stern voice stopped Vincent. “How many?”
Hank returned Harvey’s frank gaze, dead serious. “Based on the number of people we saw, if half of them make it out here, we’ll be overrun.”
Harvey stared at the scouts for a minute, thinking. I knew he’d been through a lot as the leader of The Oasis, but this was a challenge to dwarf all others. Then he spoke. “We can’t support an entire city of people, and we can’t turn them back if they want to come in. So now what?”
Harvey’s eyes traveled around his inner circle. No words passed. Where before they’d blurted out what they thought or felt, now we witnessed the full effect of Harvey’s strength. Through force of will, he kept them from losing the self-control, the sanity and judgment, he
knew he needed from each of them. He looked to each one in turn. In my mind, I assumed he was saying, “What would you do? If you have an idea, speak it now.” No one said a word.
After a long while, Harvey said, “We’re peaceful people. Here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to set up a new perimeter, as far outside the current walls as we reasonably can. Every able person will help in the effort. There are lodges all through the lake areas, not just here where we are. We’ll stop them and tell them that we can save them, as long as they’ll do it our way. We’ll cure them of the disease if they come to us peacefully.”
It was a brilliant plan that had no hope of ever working.
22
The first of them arrived that night, in vehicles of all sizes: cars, trucks, RVs, tractor-trailers. Regardless of our planning, they would have broken through, and did. The time we had to make a new perimeter wall was not enough. To my knowledge, Harvey was never even able to present his offer of a cure in exchange for mutual peace. By the time our scouts raced to tell us outsiders were coming, it was too late. The new perimeter — a wide arc of thick wooden posts from freshly cut trees, not even half-finished — crumbled like tissue paper. Then the real gate did, too. There were groups of men with guns, families, women caravanning together, kids scattered among them all. Too many, too enraged. Not infected, just too worked up with fear, adrenaline, and desperation to think straight. They plowed through our defenses just to get at what we had: safety, serenity. They paid no attention to the fact that their destruction was the antithesis of what they had come for.
People died. Their people, fighting their way in. Our people, holding the gates, or protecting their loved ones at every lodge door and campsite. Once the main gate was breached, their vehicles streamed in. But it was a small road, narrow, bordered by Hickory Knob’s dense woodland. They all tried to get in at once and quickly jammed up. Cars and trucks were locked against each other, with new arrivals piling up behind them by the dozens or the hundreds, or maybe even the thousands. From somewhere far outside the gate, past the new perimeter, we heard a terrible noise that sounded like the end of all things. At least for The Oasis, it was.